Stories by: David Hellaby

This year is shaping up as the start of a testing time for both the IT and consumer electronics channels as both battle to grab the lion's share of the booming digital home market. It is a battle on many fronts and one that is more likely to be won through collaboration than confrontation.

There are plenty of opportunities in a booming inkjet market, but resellers need to keep there finger on the pulse if they are to take full advantage, reports David Hellaby.

Printer vendors have a lot to thank the digital camera market for. The mushrooming demand for digital cameras and the growing popularity of multifunction printers have breathed new life into the inkjet market.

IT has been a good year for the major security software vendors with most of the majors reporting big increases in income and turnover. Among them Symantec posted a 48 per cent increase in global revenue for the first quarter of the year while Trend Micro's second quarter revenue was up 30 per cent and net income increased 144 per cent year-on-year.

It's either feast or famine in the flat panel market these days. Few IT related markets have experienced the level of volatility that the international LCD panel market has in recent weeks as the global shortage has rapidly given way to oversupply and prompted Taiwanese and Korean manufacturers to offer prices that range from good to desperate.

Queenslanders are digging in for a bad storm season and preparing themselves for a summer of blackouts. There are already thunder clouds over the executive offices of the two major power suppliers - Ergon and Energex - which have been accused of letting the state's power infrastructure deteriorate to an unacceptable level.

Australia passed the one million broadband connections mark in July, thanks largely to a price war that has seen residential rates plummet in recent months. The number of connections jumped about 50 per cent in the first half of the year as consumers and small businesses rushed to take advantage of the lower rates.

There are two ‘givens’ in IT — security will constantly need to be updated and the world will never have enough storage.

IT is not that long ago that a notebook PC was considered purely and simply a business tool; a weapon for the road warrior who needed to slay his or her paperwork while on the move. It was a line of thinking driven by cost — portability was not always cheap, and the inability of because notebooks to compete with desktops in terms of processing power and graphics.

Convergence has been a buzz word for the past decade but it has been a long time coming; however, with the impending arrival of Windows XP Media Centre Edition it may finally be about to arrive and with it will come a host of opportunities for the channel.

As governments around the world require companies to keep more and more data and make accessible, Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) has been hyped as the silver bullet to fix the problem. But David Hellaby reports there is more confusion than cure surrounding ILM.